When the Baby Boomer Generation starting taking over in the 90’s was when the rot started. Remember when there was the movement. led by innumerate Soft Science Majors, to rebrand Science Fiction as (quote) Speculative Fiction (un-quote)? When is Fiction not speculative, bah…
Personal anecdote time: as a fan of David Brin’s Startide Rising Trilogy I was initially interested in buying the new Brin book Glory Season(1993). Reading the Author’s Afterword where Brin mentioned that, IIRC, the book was a personal effort at writing a ‘feminist novel’ and that he had gotten flak from feminists because (obviously!) “…he was a male author.”
No, didn’t buy, never read it. I buy fiction books to be entertained, I buy factual books to be educated., and if I want to be preached to then I can go to a church…

Speculative Fiction I always thought was a re-branding effort to allow book-sellers to co-market science fiction and fantasy stories in the same books section. As a hard SF fan, I never understood the push. Fantasy fiction (read magic) is about as far from Science fiction as one can get. Never understood the presumed cross-over appeal. Most fantasy stories AFAICT are just LoTR wannabees. And not very good. But that’s just me. If you want cross-over there are the first three Dune books. That’s definitive soft SF and for me a real slog to read. Guess I’m just an old, unrepentant Glory Road kind of guy…

Lord of the Rings. There’s a “universe” in need of the “Darth Vader/the Empire is the real good-guy” treatment. I never got the nostalgia for a pre-industrial feudalistic apartheid. A society as corrupt, rigid and dehumanizing as that of Dune, even if it is cuter. (I’ve only seen the movies, and only because they were free and I was really bored.)

Glory Road is sorta a SF/Fantasy crossover. Like Niven’s Warlock series. The key seems to be- make magic and “scientific” and logicial, set the parameters and stick by them no matter how popular the series becomes.

I like Glory Road and Niven’s The Magic Goes Away stuff for the same reasons as you. Glory Road wasn’t even Heinlein’s first crack at this sort of thing. Read Magic, Inc. if you haven’t ever. An earlier Heinlein work and just as good.

You’re a better man than I am if you made it through all three of the original Dune trilogy. Or maybe just a more masochistic one. Or one with a higher pain tolerance. I tried to read the original Dune twice. Couldn’t get past roughly page 60 either time. As Leonard Pinth-Garnell would have said, “Awful! Awful!”

I am a moderate fan of the 1985 David Lynch-directed movie version of Dune – largely because Lynch’s taste in female cast members matches mine. Francesca Annis, in 1985, presented an excellent case for being declared the most beautiful woman on the planet – I refer to both Earth and Arrakis. Sean Young also looked at least as good as she did in Blade Runner and No Way Out. Virginia Madsen’s cameo was memorable too.

I gather most of Herbert’s readers were not fans of this treatment of his work. Figures.

Atypically for Lynch, who has made something of a specialty of the telling of twisty tales, he actually had to mostly do un-twisting of the tale when he tackled Dune. He wasn’t entirely successful, but he rendered the thing comprehensible at least, even if it was on his own terms and not those of Herbert.

Never watched the mini-series “remake” that was done on premium cable a couple decades back. The actors in the major cast roles looked close to uniformly inferior to Lynch’s crew. William Hurt was probably a better Duke Leto than fish-out-of-water Jurgen Prochnow, but I wasn’t going to pay even a short-term premium cable surcharge for the privilege of finding out.

“Remember when there was the movement. led by innumerate Soft Science Majors, to rebrand Science Fiction as (quote) Speculative Fiction (un-quote)?”

Started in the sixties, I believe. Certainly it was a fairly well-known term in the UK by the mid-80s.

Yeah, the takeover of SFF outlets like Tor in the 90s was a big escalation. But it wasn’t the start of the rot. The rot was already on the exponential growth curve by then. British SF, for example, was full of commies and Trots by the 90s.

After all, SF and fantasy are the natural genres for SJWs, because they’re the only places where socialism can work.

Heck, even Wells was writing proto-SJSF nearly a hundred years ago. Though I’m still trying to work out how The Time Machine, with the evil, ugly working-class (Morlocks) eating the pure, beautiful upper-class (Eloi), fits into his Fabian beliefs.

As with much of the rest of traditional media, the Left have taken over book publishing – including, unfortunately, SF book publishing – at just about the time the whole institution is about to die of old age. Self-publishing is the normative future. That will be true even if Amazon also goes SJW and censors content. Alternative free-speech self-publishing platforms will arise. There’s money to be made if Amazon stupids away its first-mover advantage.